Economy
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them,
I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house
which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord,
Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.
I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner
in civilized life again.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city
you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself
with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious
despair is concealed even under what are called the games and
amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes
after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate
things.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called
comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive
hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries
and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagerlife
than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, Persian,
and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward
riches, none so rich in inward...
The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life
in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they
left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed
with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt,
as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading
the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain-tops.
But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who
independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become
a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper.
We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on
earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely
as an improved method of agriculture. We have built for this world
a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works
of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from
this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this
low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There
is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if
any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and
streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail
to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero
or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid
for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained,
I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while
he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through
into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation.
Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and
went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended
to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white
pines, still in their youth, for timber.
I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house,
ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret
and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one
door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost
of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as I used,
but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself [with
others and borrowed tools], was as follows; and I give the details
because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost,
and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials
which compose them:--
Boards ................................... $ 8.03
[mostly shanty boards]
Refuse shingles for roof sides .......4.00
Laths ....................................... 1.25
Two second-hand windows
with glass ..................................2.43
One thousand old brick ............... 4.00
Two casks of lime ...................... 2.40 [That
was high.]
Hair ......................................... 0.31 [More
than I needed.]
Mantle-tree iron ..........................0.15
Nails ........................................ 3.90
Hinges and screws ......................0.14
Latch ........................................0.10
Chalk ....................................... 0.01
Transportation ...........................1.40 [I
carried a good part]
In all .................................... $28.12+
These are all the materials, excepting the timber,
stones, and sand, which I claimed by squatter's right. I have
also a small woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which
was left after building the house.
I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main
street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases
me as much and will cost me no more than my present one.
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could
not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover
that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life,
living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless
it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all
the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to
put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave
close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest
terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole
and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world;
or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to
give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men,
it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether
it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded
that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and
enjoy him forever."
...Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest
man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in
extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity,
simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three,
and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half
a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst
of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and
storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed
for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to
the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and
he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one;
instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in
proportion.
Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states,
with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot
tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with
all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are
all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown
establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its
own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation
and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the
only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern
and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.
It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation
have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and
ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or
not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a
little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails,
and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon
our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads
are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we
stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We
do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think
what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is
a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them,
and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over
them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years
a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the
pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be
ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his
sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake
him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about
it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes
a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and
level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may
sometime get up again.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined
to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time
saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save
nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of any consequence.
… Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after
dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's
the news?" …After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable
as the breakfast. "Pray tell me anything new that has happened
to a man anywhere on this globe" …
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think
that there are very few important communications made through
it. … And I am sure that I never read any memorable news
in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or
killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked,
or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western
Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in
the winter -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If
you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a
myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news,
as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are
old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this
gossip…
What news! how much more important to know what that is which
was never old! … If we respected only what is inevitable
and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the
streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only
great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,
that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the
reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the
eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men
establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere,
which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children,
who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly
than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they
are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. … Men esteem
truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest
star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is
indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places
and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the
present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of
all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime
and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the
reality that surrounds us…
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature…Why should
we knock under and go with the stream.?.... If the engine whistles,
let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings,
why should we run? … Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats
and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about
our business.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while
I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its
thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink
deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I
cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet.
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day
I was born…
Reading
With a little more deliberation in the choice of
their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students
and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting
to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity,
in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are
mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear
no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher
raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and
still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh
a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold,
and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled
on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed.
That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is
neither past, present, nor future.
My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious
reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range
of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come
within the influence of those books which circulate round the
world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now
merely copied from time to time on to linen paper.
…The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our
mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate
times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and
line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out
of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap
and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little
to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem
as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare
and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days
and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language,
which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual
suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer
remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.
Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length
make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous
student will always study classics, in whatever language they
may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the
classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?
… In this country, the village should in some respects take
the place of the nobleman of Europe. It should be the patron of
the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the magnanimity
and refinement. It can spend money enough on such things as farmers
and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending
money for things which more intelligent men know to be of far
more worth. ….
The Baker Farm
An honest, hard-working, but shiftless man plainly was John Field;
and his wife, she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners
in the recesses of that lofty stove; with round greasy face and
bare breast, still thinking to improve her condition one day;
with the never absent mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it
visible anywhere. … I tried to help him with my experience,
telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that
I too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was
getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight, light,
and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of
such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose,
he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own;
that I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor
fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them; again, as
I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me
but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, and coffee,
and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for
them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to
repair the waste of his system -- and so it was as broad as it
was long, indeed it was broader than it was long, for he was discontented
and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he had rated it
as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and
coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that
country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life
as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does
not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and
other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result
from the use of such things. For I purposely talked to him as
if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one. I should be glad
if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if
that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves…
Conclusion
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went
there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to
live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable
how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and
make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week
before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and
though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite
distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into
it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is
soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths
which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the
highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live
the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected
in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an
invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will
begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old
laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal
sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of
beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the
universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude,
nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built
castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where
they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally,
are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the
Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog
is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because
he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy
that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor
to be what he was made.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such
desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step
to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It
is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree
or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition
of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality
which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain
reality…
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it
and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks
poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults
even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps
have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.
The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse
as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before
its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind
may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts,
as in a palace. The town's poor seem to me often to live the most
independent lives of any. Maybe they are simply great enough to
receive without misgiving. Most think that they are above being
supported by the town; but it oftener happens that they are not
above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be
more disreputable. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like
sage… Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, "and
lo! creation widens to our view." … Moreover, if you
are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books
and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most
significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with
the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch.
It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended
from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity
on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money
is not required to buy one necessary of the soul…
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat
at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious
attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away
hungry from the inhospitable board…
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet
we tolerate incredible dullness. The light which puts out our
eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
